


Walden Pond

by TheUniversalTruth



Category: Ralph Waldo Emerson - Fandom, Walden - Henry David Thoreau
Genre: Fluff, Friendship, Gay, M/M, MxM - Freeform, Pining, Ralph Waldo Emerson - Freeform, bxb - Freeform, henry david thoreau - Freeform, hinted homosexual feelings, transcendentalism, walden - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-03
Updated: 2017-05-03
Packaged: 2018-10-27 10:13:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10807041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheUniversalTruth/pseuds/TheUniversalTruth
Summary: I put MxM in the tags, but it's very slight suggestion. It's more about the friendship of Emerson and Thoreau, but I definitely ship them... Basically an account of their friendship from the perspective of Ellen Emerson (Ralph's daughter) in letter format, addressed to Thoreau post-mortem.





	Walden Pond

“I went to the wood because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” 

-Walden, Henry David Thoreau, 17

 

Our first year with you began during the warmest season in Boston. Some invisible haze brought on by the summer heat hung over all its inhabitants and was only unbearable to those who had never been below our great state. My father was restless for your arrival and could talk of nothing but reuniting with his old friend. Each sentence from his mouth began with, 

“Ellen, dear, how you will be impressed by his…” 

One might have thought he was attempting to plan my engagement to you, what with the way he would sing your praises. However, every word he spoke of you proved true. Your brilliance was beyond my comprehension, and the effortless way in which you could weave some existential truth into a description of the natural world was a singular gift no man before you seemed to possess. The great Thoreau had come to teach us his ways, and with the boys away and mother gone to all her conventions and gatherings, I alone got to enjoy your teachings with my father. 

The first couple months passed in the only manner one could expect, given our particular circumstance. Though you stayed out in your woodland home; my father and I frequented your lodgings often to hear of your most recent revelations. As the seasons shifted into each phase of our journey, they seemed to mirror the great crescendo of color and sound.

As the trees strained against the warm breezes for any hint of mist to be sucked from the air, my father and I began our afternoon treks to where your cabin lay on the hill. Though it was only a meager distance away on our property, settled humbly between the trees and the pond, there was always some other worldness to our short journeys. It seemed as if we were traveling to some far mountaintop upon which the small hut of a wizened old monk sat waiting for our arrival, and when the time came for us to part, we would do so having just been exposed to some portion of the universe’s dearest secrets. And so you did divulge such secrets in the recounts of your experiences much earlier in the morning. We would sit with you as we digested our lunches (you having not eaten, as you professed that even meals were subject to your ever present philosophy of “Simplify, simplify, simplify!”, and you had reduced your palate to two meals which encompassed only breakfast and dinner). My father sat, as close to the edge of his seat as one could muster, directly across from you and I diagonally upon the wooden floor below. You had promised to add one more chair for me, so that there were three in total, even though it didn’t quite fit in with your maxim of simplicity. 

As we sat, your tales would hold revelations all falling under one of several themes for which you had built your little woodland home. The summer followed closely with those ideas regarding economy and society. You showed us the value in creating your life in full self-reliance and of needing no dependance upon society. You went on to criticize your fellow transcendentalists who sought alternative societies at Brook Farm and Oneida. In your eyes, these were not true experiments in dissent from traditional societal views, although you still respected many of their beliefs and practices. Each chair, each piece of food, and each means of sustenance and entertainment, you obtained yourself. 

I remember tripping along after you one July afternoon in the woods, as you led me to the spot where you retrieved each huckleberry. The importance was not in the primeness of the berries, but in the way they were obtained. No berry could taste as good as one you picked yourself, and the same applied to the rows of beans you grew proudly along your land. Though I had doubted such a statement, as I breathed heavily leaning against a nearby tree, I could not deny the truth of the statement as I picked my own small berry. Warm from the summer sun, the round berry laid gleaming, a deep blue that contrasted with the pale inside of my hand. Bringing it to my lips I bit into the tight skin covering the outside, and waited for the purple juice to burst from within onto my tongue. Such an act would not typically have made my hand tremble or my stomach jump in anticipation, but the earnest way in which you professed its importance had heightened my curiosity to the point of enthrallment. The huckleberry was the first in the many experience I was exposed to that showed me the forgotten significance of these small acts of self guided exploration and interaction with nature. It was also the first step in my own discovery of the superfluous and vapid nature of society, especially as a young female. Society, in your eyes, had denied this pleasure of themselves and every part of true enjoyment that comes from living in tune with nature in such a way. They had muddled all the joys of living simply and the pure nature of being human, with all of their frivolities and needless amenities. It was at times like these that I myself forgot that I was in fact, a member of this society which you spoke so critically of.

The days grew shorter, and the leaves began to transform the city into the notorious Boston autumn. As the trees’ once yellow tone faded into rustic orange and maroons, a brisk chill, the smell of crushed leaves, and last night’s rainfall hung in the air. Scents of smoke from the fireplace and apples from markets intertwined with the cinnamon aroma that resided permanently in our kitchen. These smells; however, did not compete with the sights that met us as we made our way out into the woods. While the colorful trees framed the roads in the town like watchful sentries, they grew freely in the woods without seeking the permission of the town leaders. They wound their way towards the heavens, bleeding into the foggy sky above. The break in their heavy dark trunks, opened to the clearing of your house like the entrance to some hidden palace, shrouded in mist and colors. Leaves of gold and brown lay like a carpet across the earthen floor. 

This was the season of which the themes of a well lived life, spiritually and existentially, tied in with the search for the greatness of mankind. The ways that a simple life in nature could bring out the true goodness and value of man showed you the means necessary for man to live the life he was meant to, and to live it to the fullest. In essence the meaning of being human, and how to experience every ounce of true importance, and meaning, life has to offer. Settled upon the edge of the canoe, as you spoke of these ideas to my father, I listened intently. I couldn’t shake the odd feeling that the pond itself was your consciousness, and the tree lining and heavy fog was your skull encasing us as we rowed slowly through the contents of your mind. Frogs of truth lept from lily pad to lily pad, disappearing into the fog before we could study them further. The shiny glimmer of fish tales sprung from the water gracefully arching their slim bodies, each individual in color and thought. A small family of ducks swam quietly farther ahead of us, but one strayed behind to forge its own path along the edge of our canoe. Its curious nature and strange bill distinguished it from the rest who trailed obediently behind the largest one. The nature around us seemed to mimic the ideas you had conveyed to us and painted a new world of psychology and philosophy beneath the mundane, invisible to the naked eye.

So the cycle continued as the year came to a close and another followed passing twice as quickly. As the time came for you to officially rejoin society and its properties, I witnessed a change in my father. The growth he had experienced now turned sour with bitterness as the final winter now reversed his progress, and the prospect of returning solely to the daily interactions of society turned his countenance hard and distant. The night you left I stood by his door wishing to comfort him. I knew that I could never open the door once more into that world of insight which you held open for us, and that you had promptly slammed shut in our faces with a short, but friendly, goodbye.

It has been 17 years since your stay with us, and I’m no longer a little girl. My father received word of your passing last month, and I have moved back seeing as how I alone am the only one who truly understands what it means to him. It’s as if some part of him that he had disconnected with has suddenly been forced upon him in an insidious wave of grief. 

My mother does not understand how he suffers because he has put on a passive front for her benefit. You once said that there is no remedy for love but to love more, and so he has tried to let the love of our family heal and distract him. Some days I suspect that he has truly recovered, but then every so often, I catch him staring out along the woods, as if hoping you might be settled in your cabin writing away about the trees or Walden pond...

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations to waste a moment on yesterdays.”  
-Letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson to his daughter, Ellen


End file.
